Path to White House can be humbling
WASHINGTON - Journalist Richard Ben Cramer's landmark tome about presidential campaigns, "What it Takes," expends 1,097 pages showing what it takes for someone to win the presidency, and the answer is: It takes everything, and then some.
Voters will reject every show of vanity or hubris. They don't want to be challenged or confronted with hard truths. They want their candidates to serve them, and they want proof of something like obedience - or at least submission.
There's a lesson in both Cramer's 1992 book and in recent presidential history for Hillary Clinton, who has worked hard to bring herself to the cusp of the Democratic presidential nomination, only to have some of the air start leaking out of her campaign.
The good news for her is that most successful presidential candidates faced such a moment of truth, and were able to push themselves past it. The bad news is that they had to give up some of their pride, something Clinton is probably reluctant to do.
John F. Kennedy, in 1960, was obliged to distance himself from his faith and family to prove that he had only one master, the people. In 1968, Richard Nixon was forced to remake himself entirely, rejecting his earlier self and affixing the word "new" to his name to freshen a tired brand. Others - especially those who began their quests as front-runners - had to humble themselves in other ways.
After eight years as vice president, George H.W. Bush thought he deserved the big job in 1988. Republican voters in Iowa were so unconvinced they bumped him to third place. So the patrician Bush went to New Hampshire and staged a snowball fight; he drove a forklift; he gave a maudlin speech declaring that he could have quit after his vice presidency, having been part of the great Reagan revolution, but that he wanted to stay longer and see it through.
New Hampshire voters were sufficiently impressed that they gave Bush a victory, and launched him on the path to the White House.
Four years later, in 1992, so many big-name Democrats dropped out of the race that the confident, somewhat presumptuous 45-year-old Bill Clinton entered the primary season as the best-funded and most highly endorsed candidate. But Clinton quickly became enmeshed in scandals over a past extramarital relationship and his avoidance of the Vietnam draft.
Clinton stood before crowds in New Hampshire and declared "I'm on the ropes," begging voters to save him. When he finished a strong second, he crowned himself the comeback kid and eventually took up residence at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
But while Bill Clinton loved to demonstrate his lack of self-consciousness - easily handling the boxers-vs.-briefs types of questions - Hillary was more withholding as candidate spouse and president's wife. She sometimes showed steely defiance. When, in the midst of the Whitewater investigation in early 1996, she was forced to testify before a grand jury about her law-firm billing records, she strode into the courthouse with her chin up, looking like what one wag described as a medieval queen going to the gallows.
Recent years have been kinder to her. She has remade herself, but not in the scripted manner of Nixon. She is vastly more comfortable as US senator from New York and presidential candidate than she was as first lady. She seems natural and approachable, but still a bit imperious.
For seven years, Clinton has built up her credibility in national security matters, preparing to take on a hawkish Republican. But now she finds herself in a duel for the Democratic nomination with the younger, more dynamic Senator Barack Obama of Illinois, who exudes a Bill Clinton-like sensitivity to average people. For months, Democrats seemed wary of Obama's lack of experience in foreign policy, but then domestic issues took center stage, and Obama began to rise.
This weekend, when Chelsea Clinton finally joined her mother on the stump, she seemed to be wondering the same thing as the rest of the country: Are we really up for another go-round?
Hillary Clinton has to make sure the answer is yes, and it probably requires a more direct, humble appeal to voters. She needs to show just how badly she wants to be president, how eager she is to serve.
On Sunday, her campaign released a new television ad in Iowa and New Hampshire, entitled "New Beginning."
"I will stand up for you every single day in the White House," she promises.
It seems like a good start.
Peter S. Canellos is the Globe's Washington bureau chief. National Perspective is his weekly analysis of events in the capital and beyond. 